The Death of Mainstream Media
Woke up this morning. Turned on the Mac. Put water on to boil. Set the beans to grind. Picked up the latest Atlantic Monthly, and flipping backwards, landed on this article: Get Me Rewrite, by Michael Hirschorn.
This would seem like the moment to get on my high horse and defend the daily newspaper, with its omnibus approach to everything from your town to the world, its high/low pastiche, its editorial ordering function that allows readers to weigh and sort multitudinous news inputs into a coherent worldview. But this is what I would call, to borrow a Wall Street term, sell-side logic. It flatters the people who have a vested interest in preserving the gatekeeper function and the economic margins provided by dead-tree media, or who see newspapers as a cultural bulwark against the barbarians. The barbarians, on the other hand, don’t seem to care; they’d rather get the news they want, not the news the mandarins say is good for them.
I’m reading about the decline of mainstream media (news media to be more precise) in a print magazine, prior to my morning ritual of perusing news and content on the web. It’s interesting. It’s a topic I’ve thought quite a bit about. And, as interesting as EPIC is (a future look back at the history of media, from 2015 backwards) is, along with Hirschorn’s thoughts, incomplete. There’s so much left to say.
Hirschorn warns against the “sell-side” logic, yet doesn’t really flesh out the demand side. And all the examples in EPIC are too mainstream themselves. Oddly no mention of Digg, Slashdot, or Metafilter. What about The Well or Salon in it’s early days? The “Faint Signals at the Fringe”, a thought piece my innovation partner and I have continued to develop and refine, tells a story of the future through the little guys, the startups, the renegades. Yes, Google, is a big guy now, but the way to tell its story is through the acqusitions trail. They’ve gobbled up the faint signals that were increasing in amplitude and frequency.
So here’s my pledge. Read the Atlantic article, and watch EPIC, and I’ll work this weekend on putting a little “faint signals” seasoning on the Death of MSM discussion. You can find threads of this in the non-MSM on a site like Kottke, or at Technorati, or Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. And I don’t intend to rehash all those arguements. I think there is another angle in to this story… and another way to paint the future.
19 December: I’ve been doing some background reading prior to laying out my perspective. There is too much rhetoric regarding this and I don’t want to mindlessly add to it. I’d like to put a framework, assumptions, a theory down that can help advance this whole Media Futures debate forward. Something will come in the next week or so.